It was a strange time to have a team vision session because it felt more like we were in survival mode than future mode.
The state of the world was making it very difficult to look ahead. It was January 21, 2021, and our church leadership team had brought in a couple of consultants who were passing through our area to help us think about the future of the church.
COVID still had a paralyzing grip on our imaginations. Collective PTSD hung in the air with the fog of lockdowns, loneliness and isolation, and the scars of political rancor and racial unrest still fresh. Our society was in the final stages of a cultural and spiritual meltdown. I was secretly thankful that the church was still standing, and the bills were paid, let alone dreaming about our next chapter.
Personally, I had just turned 50 years old. Having been a pastor at Grace Church for 26 years, now over half of my life. I had just written a book called Untapped Church about our incredible volunteer leadership culture, over 2/3 of our full staff were unpaid volunteer leaders. We were an unusual mega-church being fueled by our collective strengths rather than one central personality. Other than that, we had followed classic church-growth principles for most of my tenure at Grace to great success especially in an economically depressed, rust-belt city in the spiritually cynical northeastern US. It had been a good run. One that I had every intention of riding out for another decade or so. Doing things the way we had always done it. According to the prevailing metrics, it was working.
Back to the vision session.
After some historical perspective, the two consultants started with the usual questions, starting broadly and getting more specific. What had we been learning? What are the greatest restraints that are currently holding us back from our mission? Who are we reaching? Who are we losing? Why should we consider a shift in our strategy. We engaged a side-bar discussion around the discipline of re-invention. We acknowledged that things are always changing, especially now. Strategies don’t last forever. Grace is a very old church, born in 1895, she had been through a lot of big changes. From a house to a church building, from services in Swedish to English, from a landlocked urban building to a suburban mission field, from single location to multi-site, from analogue to hybrid digital.
For the past 30 years, we had always operated on a series of vision cycles. Every three to five years, we introduce new initiatives or programming or staffing. We raise money around these new initiatives and position ourselves for growth. This had been our consistent practice, built on the firm foundation of church growth principles that we had learned from Willowcreek and Saddleback back in the glory days of mega-church in 80’s and 90’s. A good summary of these methods is outlined in the book Future Church by Will Mancini.
- Church growth is secured by individual commitments made in a decision at a public event.
- Church growth results in the church being a visible and prominent community institution.
- Church growth comes from providing programs that young families want to access.
- Church growth requires a culturally relevant and inspiring public experience with outstanding customer service and hospitality.
- Church growth is measured by the numbers of people attending and serving in worship services and other programs arranged as steps in a linear process.
This had been our model since I arrived, and it had worked. When I first got to Grace, I was the youngest guy in the room. Now I was the oldest. The methods we used to get here were tried and true, but there was a haunting sense in me for the past decade that the church growth, attractional assimilation model was losing steam. Even though our church’s key metrics were up and to the right, in the broader culture the church was losing ground. Now this very sentiment was being voiced by our vision team in this meeting. Maybe it was time for major changes not just minor tweaks. Maybe it was time to “flip the funnel,” from a wide front door with narrowing commitment through an assimilation process, to a missional discipleship focus with a widening multiplication and sending outcome. In broad terms, to transition from an attractional assimilation church to a missional multiplication church. Once the conversation started going down this path, I started to feel insecure, uneasy, maybe even defensive. When I had finally heard enough, this was my exact quote to the room,
“That’s a job for the next guy.”
It seemed like too big of a shift. Too radical a change at this stage in my career. All of my three decades of training and experience had come in the church-growth model and that’s what I to ride out until the eventual baton pass to my successor.
HOWEVER…
God wouldn’t release me to do that. He wouldn’t allow me to coast to the finish line. In fact, I’m certain it wasn’t as dramatic as His calling to Moses, or Joshua, or the virgin Mary, but over the next couple of months God shook me to my soul. The sentence I had said to that room full of key staff reverberated in my mind, “that’s a job for the next guy.” In clear promptings, God was saying, “It’s actually the job I have for YOU.”
So, kicking and screaming I’ve decided I’m going to give my next 10 years or more, to walking our church through a transition in how we do church. I’m probably going to use up every bit of the trust I’ve accumulated to this point, in order to manage through this change. But I believe it’s what God has called me to in this season. I’m going to chronicle our journey through a series of resources just in case God might be asking you to make some changes too. If our journey is helpful in some small way, that would be really cool.
I’ve created a tool with some questions I used to process my time of wrestling with God about reinventing our church. You can download it here.
